Two Immortal Odes: Their Emotional Patterns
By Dr. AMARESH DATTA
(
The
Intimations of Immortality by Wordsworth and Keats’s ode to a
Nightingale are here studied together because of the resemblance of
emotional patterns or rhythms so poignantly evoked in them. This may not prove
Keats’s indebtedness to Wordsworth, particularly with regard to this Ode,
though he was deeply moved by the poetry of his great compatriot. But it
certainly brings into conspicuity that curious phenomenon in literature which
lies in the basic sameness of approach by distinctly different types to a
crucial problem of life and in times of crisis. And both these poems are
products of a great spiritual crisis and, as poems, two supreme examples of
poetic quest for truth and wisdom.
Wordsworth
composed his poem in 1802–if we take only the first part–when he was
thirty-two; Keats was only twenty-two when he wrote his poem in 1819. These are
significant dates in the respective lives and poetry of these two great poetic
types of the nineteenth century. And I am persuaded that it is the same search
for a sense of security and a wider and deeper
comprehension of life that prompted Wordsworth to add seven more stanzas to the
original poem and Keats to write the Ode on a Grecian Urn as a natural
sequence to the Nightingale Ode. The difference that exists between the two
poets is a difference of temperament and age, but the basic pattern and
approach and even the concluding assurance in life realised
at least in these two poems are, to my mind, virtually the same. And what is
more important, both these poems, it seems to me, deal with the same theme–the
feeling of immortality in the midst of suffering and despair. Wordsworth’s poem
is obviously an ode on the intimations of immortality, but Keats’s is
considered, by’ the ‘general consensus of opinion, a poem of escape, escape
from the ‘fever and fret’ of life to the world of the Nightingale’s song and
abiding joy, and also the inevitable failure of that escape. But essentially, I
think, it is a poem that holds up, by contrast, man’s longing for immortality
and his sudden glimpse into the Eternal in a moment through ecstasy and
identification. The Nightingale is as much a symbol of immortality to Keats as
the child is an incarnation of immortality to Wordsworth.
Many
influences and verbal echoes, both contemporary and distant, have been traced
in these poems by competent scholars. Prof. Garrod
suggests that the immediate source of Wordsworth’s poem is Coleridge’s
sonnet composed in 1796 ‘On receiving a letter informing me of the birth of a
son’ and one line in that sonnet, ‘We lived ere yet this robe of flesh we
wore,’ may be cited as almost a proof of Coleridge’s
influence. The professor goes to the extent of saying: “I cannot help thinking
that the child depicted in the Ode is actually Hartley Coleridge.”
One may even trace the source ultimately to Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence,
though the methods of approach and understanding may be fundamentally different
between the poet-hating philosopher and the anointed poet; but Plato, Coleridge and the rest of them are mere external stimuli,
just convenient pegs. It was the circumstances and the poet’s reactions to them
that, in the ultimate analysis, will be found to be the deciding factors in the
composition of the poem. Similarly in Keats’s Ode, diverse influences from
scattered sources can be easily detected. There are echoes from
Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Claude Brown’s Britannia’s
Pastorals, Coleridge’s poem on Nightingale, and
even Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets which
Keats attended with some of his friends, and, above all, thoughts and
sentiments derived from a whole world of associations gathered round the bird
through centuries. But all these are matters of unconscious borrowing and mere
application of words, and rarely sentiments, to a pattern which is wholly Keatsian, and the poem is in every respect an admirable
product of poetic alchemy. With reference to the circumstances, physical and
spiritual, under which the poem was composed, the need for a poetic
utterance of such intensity will be better understood. Both these poets,
Wordsworth and Keats, turned to the problem of life and death, beauty and
decay, light and shade, almost instinctively guided by the spirit’s longing for
an upholding faith when the trusted earth gave them suddenly a feeling of
betrayal.
The
general opinion regarding Wordsworth among critics is that he was born with a
mystic vision and whatever he wrote, the, Immortality Ode being no exception,
is a spontaneous and inevitable expression of this latent poetic gift. Such
critics deduce too much of autobiographical fidelity from the ‘Prelude’,
forgetting conveniently that the emotions ‘recollected in tranquility’ are
usually wish-projections of the might-and-should-have-beens
of the earlier life. In fact there is, as I think Prof. Raleigh has suggested,
nothing Wordsworthian about the boy Wordsworth, and,
even among the Wordsworthian scheme of things, this
Ode is a unique phenomenon. And this uniqueness is an expression of a unique
experience to which Wordswrorth came in the course of
his poetic development through innumerable other experiences. It may be
mentioned, obiter,–and this seems to be the truth about Wordsworth–that he
ceased to be an inspiring poet as soon as he began to have settled views on man
and nature. When his ‘obstinate questioning’ was over–and it was almost over by
1805–writing to him was a matter of habit, not inspiration.
But
to turn to the boy Wordsworth: he was, like any other boy, a passionate lover
of thrillers such as The Arabian Nights, Jack, the Giant Killer, Robin Hood and
the like. In his adolescence, like any other sensitive youth of his age, he
felt strongly against social injustice and inequality and wrote satirical verses
in the vein of Juvenal. It was his intimate experience of the French Revolution
and, different in degree though by no means in intensity, his love-experience
in France that drew him out of his sentimental youth to the full glare
of a terrifying life. His response and reaction to the events of his time may
be illustrated by his poems, and to me they seem to be vitally important for an
understanding of his poetry.
Wordsworth,
temperamentally optimistic but momentarily dissatisfied with the conditions of
living, had gone to
The
Ode, I believe, does not imply a doctrinal belief in pre-existence. Wordsworth
commenting on the poem says: “Having to wield some of its elements when I was
impelled to write this poem on the Immortality of the soul, I took hold of the
notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising me to make for my purpose the best use I could
of it as a poet.” But that does not mean Wordsworth wanted his readers to
disregard the philosophic content as a myth and judge the poem merely as a work
of formal art. Such a view is absolutely untenable. For one thing, judgment of
poetry by isolation is bad criticism and the entire ‘Prelude’ is an emphatic
refutation of this view. What Wordsworth meant by immortality is a state of
bliss and joy, recognised by contrast and savoured by a sudden and ecstatic identification with it.
Thus when Wordsworth calls the child a ‘philosopher, a seer blest, the eye
among the blind’, he expresses a pining for the ideal of understanding through
intuition and joy which is symbolised by the child.
Keats also, I presume, meant the same thing when he called the light-winged
Dryad of the trees an immortal bird whom no hungry
generations can tread down. The contrast images of both these poems deserve
careful attention in this context.
Keats
also came to the thought of immortality through various experiences which in
his case were more intensely personal. The death of one brother, the migration
of another, his sister’s miserable life, his unhappy love affair with Fanny Brawne, a painful consciousness of his own fast approaching
end and sundry other sad circumstances, led his mind almost inevitably to the
thought of some abiding joy and the imperishability of the soul. Keats also was
thinking of divinity in terms of childhood. In that memorable letter where he
speaks of the world as a vale of soul-making, he incidentally remarks: “In them
(children) the spark of intelligence returns to God without any identity–it
having had no time to learn of, and be altered by, the heart or seat of human
passions.” Maybe he was influenced by Leigh Hunt’s idea of immortality set
forth against the Christian theology, but, as in the case of Wordsworth, the
influence is merely an external stimulus and as such superficial. The thought
of the immortality of the soul and even personal immortality came to Keats
spontaneously, naturally, for no other English poet was so profoundly conscious
of mortality and decay. Wordsworth’s child, of course, is already a soul in
divine splendour which has already attained an
identity. Keats’s child is only a divine spark. So the difference is obvious,
but both the poets tread on common ground when they associate divinity with
childhood. Another similarity between these two poets should also be observed
here. In moments of extreme joy and ecstasy which, unveiling the mystery of
life, bring a taste of immortality, Keats passionately yearns for death. ‘To
cease upon the midnight hour with no pain’ when the nightingale is pouring
forth his soul abroad in ecstasy, ‘to swoon to death pillow’d
upon my fair love’s ripening breast’–are recurring sentiments in Keats’s
poetry. But the death he invokes is the death of the body only, by whose
disguised blessing the moments of saturated joy may remain eternalised
in his mind. This strange experience, though not exactly similar, comes also to
Wordsworth often in his moments of extreme bliss. When
...this
corporeal frame
And
even the motion of our human blood
Almost
suspended, we were laid asleep
In
body and became a living soul.
We may now turn to the analysis of the emotional patterns of these Odes. The first draft of the Wordsworthian Ode will be compared with Keats’s poem; the later addition to the Immortality Ode should be studied with the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn” which, in emotional design and thought-content, is virtually the concluding part of the Nightingale Ode. The Nightingale poem ends on a note of grim suddenness, the feeling of finality comes only with the last two lines of the ‘Grecian Urn’ which was composed in the same year and in the same month. And I think it is more logical to treat the poems on the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn as one than to treat the two parts of the Immortality Ode as two separate poems notwithstanding the distance of four years between them.
Both
the poems begin on a note of despair. For Wordsworth,
Turn
wheresoev’r I may,
By
night or day,
The
things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Keats is saturated to
the point of insensitivity with sorrow:
My
heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My
sense...
The thought of
childhood and the song of the nightingale create in both the poets a longing
for flying up to these symbols of joy and identification. To Wordsworth
Thou
child of joy,
Shout
round me, let me hear thy shout, thou happy shepherd-boy.
Keats’s nightingale is
a
...light-winged
Dryad of the trees,
In
some melodious plot
Of
beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest
of summer in full-throated ease.
At last both the
poets, on the wings of imagination, attain the desired identification.
Wordsworth says:
...I
see
The
heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My
heart is at your festival,
My
head hath its coronal,
The
fullness of your bliss, I feel,–I feel it all.
Keats echoes:
Away!
away! for I will fly to thee,
Not
charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But
on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though
the dull brain perplexes and retards!
Already
with thee!
But the thought of
children culling flowers on every side brings to Wordsworth’s mind the memory
of a tree, a single field he has looked upon and then:
The
Pansy at my feet
Doth
the same tale repeat–
Whither
is fled the visionary gleam?
Where
is it now, the glory and the dream?
Similarly the thought
of the nightingale that “charm’d magic casements
opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn” brings to Keats’s consciousness the stark reality of the word
‘forlorn’ and he too, in sudden disillusionment’ bursts into the query:
Was
it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled
is that music:–Do I wake or sleep?
Both are suddenly
brought back to their sole selves with the painful intelligence that fancy
cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do. Wordsworth recovered from
the shock in the second part of the Ode; Keats found an answer to
the enigma in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
This
is the basic emotional pattern of both these poems, but there are other similar
aspects on which an adequate emphasis should be laid for a proper study of
these Odes together.
In
both these poems the contrast between the joy-symbols and life’s growing
discomfiture has been expressed through the image of shadow and heaviness. Upon
Wordsworth’s growing boy,
Shades
of the prison house begin to close….
At
length the Man perceives it die away,
And
fade into the light of common day.
His grown-up man is,
‘In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave’ and
The
years...bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus
blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full
soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And
custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy
as frost, and deep almost as life!
Keats’s man is
burdened with ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’ in a world where
...palsy
shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs….
Where
but to think is to be full of sorrow
And
leaden-eyed despairs...
and where
...there
is no light,
Save
what from heaven is with breezes blown
Through
verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
(Incidentally the
words ‘fever’ and ‘fret’ and ‘palsy’ are echoes from Wordsworth.) Again both
the poets conjure up an entire atmosphere round their poetic symbols. Thus
round Wordsworth’s child,
….the
young lambs bound
As
to the tabor’s sound....
And
all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give
themselves up to jollity,
And
with the heart of May
Doth
every beast keep holiday.
And to Keats, when he
is already with the bird,
...tender
is the night,
And
haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all
her starry Fays.
Keeping
in mind the penultimate stanza of the Nightingale Ode where the poet hails the
nightingale as an immortal bird, it should also be noted that Wordsworth too
was contemplating on the immortality of an individual bird in a poem composed
just before this poetic masterpiece, and which cast a recognisable
shadow on the great Ode. The poem referred to is ‘To the Cuckoo’. Like, Keats’s
nightingale, this cuckoo–
...bringest unto me a tale
Of
visionary hours–
The
same whom in my school-boy days
I
listen’d to.
Keats’s perception on
beauty in the midst of suffering and failure to retain the vision with an
abiding sense of joy, have been further intensified in his next poem, ‘Ode on
Melancholy’. In a few lines of supreme poetic beauty, he relates beauty and
decay in an in-extricable bond:
She
dwells with Beauty–Beauty that must die;
And
joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding
adieu.
But he sings in the
‘Grecian Urn’ in a different key. He seems to be as much eager to find at the end
a sustaining philosophy of life as Wordsworth is eager to see the sparks of
divinity in the embers of later life–in our obstinate questionings.
Wordsworth’s
Ode does not arrogate the intimations of immortality exclusively to childhood.
“The theme for him,” as Miss Helen Darbishire rightly
points out, “the central theme is the immortal nature of the human spirit,
intuitively known by the child, partly forgotten by the growing man, but to be
known once more in maturity through intense experience of heart and mind.”
Keats writes: “Call the world if you please–‘The vale of soul-making’. Then you
will find the use of the world. (I am speaking now in the highest terms for
human nature admitting it to be immortal, which I will here take for granted
for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it.)” “The
system of spirit-creation,” he goes on to say in the same letter, “is effected
by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years.
These three materials are the Intelligence, the human heart (as distinguished
from mind), and the world or Elemental space suited for the proper action of
Mind and heart on each other, for the purpose of forming the soul or
Intelligence destined to possess the sense of identity. Do you not see how
necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make
it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse
ways.” It should be recalled in this connection that in the same letter he
speaks of children as possessing the spark or intelligence that returns to God
without any identity.
Thus
the conclusion for both the poets–basically the same–is acceptance, a soulful
acceptance of joy and sorrow, of all the stuff that ‘this life is made on’,
which by an obvious implication means a synthetic view of life and its
innumerable experiences. Wordsworth magnificently concludes:
Thanks
to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks
to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To
me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts
that do often lie too deep for tears.
Keats resolves his
quest into the profundity of a King idea:
‘Beauty
is truth, truth beauty,’–that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The
older poet perceives the continuity of the divine spark in man, now manifest,
now subdued, at times completely hidden, but never altogether absent. Also he
sees men and things in relation to a cosmic design. The apparently meanest
flower, therefore gives him thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Keats echoes
this faith with a significant reference to Wordsworth in one of his letters of
that period: “But then as Wordsworth says ‘we have all one human heart’–there
is an electric fire in human nature, tending to purify–so that among these
human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is
that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.” So the
younger poet too gradually came to realise that
everything that existed was true and, therefore, beautiful. Earthly phenomena
are not seen in isolation separately, but as integral parts of the grand whole.
Even personal sorrows, seen through such hallowed eyes, appear to be only some
of the basic elements of our many-coloured human
life. In a poem full of highly sensuous imagery, those concluding lines,
because of their sudden simplicity and spiritual tenor, may appear to be
inconsistent, but wisdom and understanding and such other qualities which they
enshrine and imply–coming as they do from a youth of twenty-two–are simply
astounding. Wordsworth too, considering the long life that he lived, performed
this rare magic fusion of youth and wisdom in the early phase of his poetic
career. He had time to develop and enrich this idea further and turn his mystic
vision into an abiding faith, but the younger poet, alas! nipped literally in
the bud, could leave behind perhaps a mightier promise than achievement. But be
it as it may, and granted the natural differences existing between any two
poets, one is bound to be attracted by the affinity of emotional patterns of
these two immortal Odes. Keats was full of Wordsworth, yet this affinity may
not be a result of conscious borrowing. Each followed his own path and drew and
deducted from his own personal experiences. The wholeness of vision which is a
certain distinguishing feature of great poetry, came to them through doubt and
suffering and as a high meed of their unwavering
spiritual quest. Wordsworth and Keats represent two distinct poetic traditions
of England–Miltonic and Shakespearean respectively, if they are to be named
after poets–yet in their great search for truth, the poetic golden fleece, both
of them traversed the same storm-tossed sea. Influence or no, all great poetry
is, in a strange way, similar.